IMonitor Software Blog

According to the 2012 In-House Creative Services Industry Report — a survey of more than 360 in-house creative departments from a variety of companies  and industries — more than 60%  use time tracking software. That percentage increases to 70% in teams of more than twenty members.

Many time tracking apps enable you to shift quickly between various projects and activities and back again with just a few clicks of the mouse. By recording how much time you spend on different tasks each day, you can better understand your own workflow, optimize the time you spend on your work, and offer greater accountability to your clients.

Understand Your Time Better

How much time each day do you and your employees  spend checking email, fielding phone calls, and working on administrative tasks? The answer might surprise you. You may spend less than five minutes checking your email — but those minutes can quickly add up over the course of a day. If you don’t record your total time spend on this single task, you could be selling yourself or your clients short on your timesheets.

Although many of these tasks are not directly related to the project you’re working on, they may still need to be completed in order for you to be able to work on your actual assignments.  With a clearer view of how you spend your time — and how that time adds up — you can take the guesswork out of your timelines, deadlines, and timesheets.

Increase Your Efficiency

By knowing how much time you and your employees spend on each type of task, you can identify tasks that can be reasonably shortened in length or eliminated completely without negatively affecting the project. Using the data within your PC management software, you can optimize your workflow to be more efficient as well as productive.

• Some apps allow you to set target times or countdowns. If you have determined that you usually spend ten minutes on email, but really only need five, you can set a timer that will start when you start checking your mail, and alert you when five minutes have passed. This prevents you from wasting time on unnecessary or ineffective processes just because you didn’t realize how much time had passed.
• Setting a countdown as a goal for completing a longer task can also help to boost your productivity and energy level by acting as an inducement to completing said task within the stipulated timeframe.

Transparency and Accountability

Your clients often want to know exactly how much time you and your employees have spent on a project. By filling out manual timesheets or manually recording time, you often end up guessing how much time was spent on each task.

• If you underestimate the time, you could wind up underpaid for the work that you did.
• If you overestimate the time, you clients will overpay you.
• If your clients discover a discrepancy in your hours, they could wind up asking awkward questions you’ll be unable to suitably answer. “Why did this task take 3 hours last week and 6 hours this week? If these employees were working together, why do they have different hours recorded? How likely are you to go over-budget on this project?”

Using the data stored in your time tracking app, you can provide your managers and clients with consistent,  accurate and detailed reports of how much time was spent on each task or project. This extra layer of transparency and accountability will benefit your client and customer relationships and provide a positive effect on your business’s reputation.

Tracking your employee’s attendance is important to your company’s bottom line. Attendance is defined, quite simply, as showing up for work, but how can you track it? By implementing well-defined policies and a tracking system.

Management and human resources departments will find that having an effective attendance policy in place creates a better work environment because employees know exactly what is expected of them.

What is Workplace Attendance?
Attendance is the act or fact of attending (being present at) work. Attendance is also used to define the number of persons present on a particular day at work.

Attendance is also referred to as ‘ present at work’ or ‘presenteeism.’

For example, an HR department may make notes like these :

Rob had a wonderful work attendance record; he rarely missed a day from work.
The attendance on first shift averaged only 75% on Mondays while employees recovered from their weekend fun.
What is an Attendance Policy?
An attendance policy provides the guidelines and expectations for employee attendance at work as defined, written, disseminated, and implemented by an organization.

Attendance policies exist most frequently for hourly or non-exempt employees for whom an organization must generally track hours.

Time at work record keeping is required by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that governs the payment of overtime.
Additionally, employees for whom attendance is tracked often perform jobs that are interdependent on other employees being in attendance. Such jobs include production line work in a manufacturing facility.

An attendance policy is sometimes used interchangeably with an absenteeism policy. My view is that an attendance policy is much more narrowly defined and limited to attendance, as opposed to absenteeism policies which address absenteeism management issues and more.

So now we can see the importance of the attendance for both company and employee. So it is necessary to track it, for the better management of company, and  employee work efficiency improvement.

However, for some employees, they don’t like to use traditional fingerprint reader time attendance machine, and some times may waste time if too many people use one machines. For company, it is very annoying to spend money on it and arrange a post to collect and analysis the data.

So the iMonitor WorkAuditor may help you, which is  a time tracking software, actually more than a employee management software . It will tracking computer start up, power off, log in and log out, then analysis those data and export as employee’s clock-in and clock-out information, which means the attendance information will record automatically.

Further more, WorkAuditor can track all computer and internet activities of employees. As the supervisor, you can see what website, application the employee visited and used, how long time they spent on that, even more, you can block those websites or applications to make employees focus on their work. And as a employee management software, WorkAuditor can also help you to monitor the employees working time, idle time, rest time.

Attendance is critical in many customer-facing jobs. Poor attendance saps employee morale, costs employers overtime expenses, and reduces employee engagement. Poor attendance takes supervisory time and attention and often results in disciplinary action.

You can manage employee attendance to reduce attendance problems. Here’s how to manage and encourage attendance. Use these steps to encourage employee attendance at work.

5 steps to Encourage Employee Attendance
First, you must have a way to track the time people take off from work so that the integrity of your Paid Time Off (PTO) policy, your sick leave policy, and / or your paid vacation policy is ensured. This also ensures that the time off rules are the same for everyone which is important for the sense of workplace fairness and justice.

This is especially important to manage unscheduled absences for which many workplaces have trouble with work coverage. Encouraging employee attendance is important for any customer facing workstation. Attendance is also critical when one employee’s work is dependent on the work of the prior employee in jobs such as manufacturing or assembling products.

Teachers, customer support specialists, technical support providers, health care professionals, and other direct service employees are examples of employees who have workstations that employees must staff on a daily basis.

Otherwise, employers are at a loss to schedule and find staff replacements to do their work.

Second, you need to manage absenteeism and encourage employee attendance. This means that the employee needs to call in directly to the supervisor who is trained to manage absenteeism.

This starts with the personal call and the supervisor telling the employee that he or she will be missed and describing the impact of their absence on the workplace.

Each absence ends with the supervisor personally welcoming the employee back to work, encouraging employee attendance in the future, and once again, emphasizing the impact of the employee’s absence on the workplace and their coworkers.

You are not holding this conversation in a blaming tone of voice – after all, many employee absences are legitimate – you are genuinely welcoming the employee back to work and reinforcing the impact of an unscheduled absence.

Third, if possible, allow flexibility with schedules in your workplace so that an employee with an early doctor’s appointment or a sick child, as examples, can work later or come earlier to make up the time.

Women, unfortunately, according to U.S. Department of Labor figures, experience more attendance problems related to family matters. Especially single moms, who have no safety net of family or a partner to help with child-care related issues, struggle with attendance, in my experience.
So, this workplace flexibility might also include the ability to share jobs, schedule flexible days or hours, and work from home, or telecommute, under guidelines. I’m not a huge fan of compensatory or comp time because I believe it encourages a clock-watching attitude. This is not in keeping with the mindset of accomplishing the whole job and goals that I look for in an exempt or salaried employee. But, exempt jobs are also the jobs that will most frequently allow flexibility for the employee and the employer.

Fourth, rewards and recognition for positive employee attendance can make a difference. While you don’t want people feeling as if their employer must pay them extra for doing their job, you do want them to know that you appreciate and respect their positive attendance.

In some cases, especially with non-exempt employees, and to reduce unscheduled absences, you may want to build actual monetary rewards into your employee attendance policy.

Too many attendance policies focus on the punishment side of the equation. More emphasis on rewards for positive attendance might give you more bang for your bucks. Nevertheless, an attendance policy must focus on both.

Finally, and probably most importantly, you need a management system which can help you tracking your employees attendance. You may have a large number of employees and that is very difficult to make sure every one will be tracked properly.  The tracking software like iMonitor WorkAuditor can help you a lot. The turn-on and turn-off of employees will be recorded as clock-in and clock-off information. The employees working idle time, active time can be recorded also.

iMonitor WorkAuditor is not only the tools that can help you tracking, further more, it’s a management software could control and supervise employees behavior without invasion of privacy.

Progressive discipline is critical, starting with coaching and feedback, and performing the steps in attendance management listed above. Your attending employees will thank you.

You can more effectively manage attendance if you follow these steps to reduce absenteeism